Property List Driven Apps with Swift – Video Tutorials

This course is now part of CartoonSmart’s streaming portal. This means you can watch the videos online, on nearly any device, any time you want. But for all our loyal CartoonSmart purist’s that love keeping a collection of their tutorials on their hard drive (or Dropbox / iCloud Drive), we can’t fault you for wanting a copy you can watch when, heaven forbid, the internet goes down. No matter how you choose to watch, you’ll see the videos in glorious HD.

This course teaches Xcode development using Swift 1.2, Apple’s latest programming language. Swift can be used to create both iOS Apps to sell through the App Store, or Mac OS apps to sell through the Mac App Store.

This course is taught by Justin Dike, owner and lead developer at CartoonSmart.com, creator of the Fantastic Worlds iOS Starter Kits, and author of iOS Game Programming with Xcode and Cocos2d (published by Focal Press). Justin has been programming iOS games since the release of the first iPhone and has been teaching development for just as long, covering mostly game related topics. He’s proficient with Cocos2d, Sprite Kit, Objective-C and most recently Swift.

This incredible series of videos will teach you how to….

Update an entire app without ever resubmitting a new build to Apple by using a Property List saved to your website.

Create a multi-tiered Table view, one with sections, sub-sections, and unlimited links (all populated via a property list) which can provide users the option to open web pages, images, videos, or do anything your app requires. For example, choose levels in a game.

Display web pages with embedded content from YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Instagram, or wherever, using query string variables added to the end of URL’s.

Pull html data / variables from a web page back into your app. Useful for any number of things, for example, allowing or denying access to an area of the app.

How to do all that (and much more) awaits you in this latest iOS video tutorial series with Swift 1.2!

...Then Open Anything!

Create Dynamic Tables...

Over 3 hours of Swift 1.2 video tutorials in a easy-to-watch segments

Session 1 – Initial Setup with Auto Layout

In this first video we will look at the initial layout of the app. This involves adding a UITableView, UIWebView and Navigation Bar to our Main.storyboard file. If you have no interest in learning (or relearning Auto-Layout) than this lesson is completely skippable and you can download the starting project, with the layout already included.

Displaying a Web View and Parsing the Property List

In these next video tutorials we will connect our IBOutlets and IBActions, make our first web request (display any site/page you want in the app), do a quick parse of the Property List, then fully parse the property list and feed all of our data into a UITable. The data is sub-sectioned so for example, we will click on a broad section of data (like Topics), then click another section (like Courses), then choose from links within that section (for example, a specific Lesson to view). This setup can be used for any kind of data.

Sending Query String Variables from the App and Receiving HTML Data Back

In this video tutorials we will learn how to send query string variables from an iOS app and use them within the content shown in our UIWebView. So for example, we might open a webpage like…. site.com/video_player?id=12345 , where the page then displays a YouTube or Vimeo embed with the ID of 12345. So using this method your Property List can open a single page and feed in countless variables for different links, or information of any sort. Along with that we can include custom titles within the app based on what we’re displaying. We will also experiment with reading data back in from a webpage (without actually showing it). So for example, this could be used to act as a kind of gateway within the app, if a particular webpage’s content displayed the word “no”, then the app wouldn’t allow a particular set of functionality. Or this could just be used to display the “message of the day” . Finally we will setup a back button so users can reverse back up the Property List data in the UITableView.

Updating the Property List from a copy stored on your website

In these next videos we mostly deal with an optional add on to the course which involves uploading a second copy of the Property List to a server and making the app use it as the primary source of data. If that Property List is unreachable, the app will fallback to checking on a locally saved version of that updated property list, and if that fails, the app will resort to using the original Property List submitted with the bundle to the App Store.

Adding Thumbnail Images to the UITableView

This video tutorial teaches how to include an image (of any size) in the UITableView to make for an obviously more eye-popping visual experience to a normal list-only table view. The property list can define either an image in the main app bundle, or an image stored on a server (both can be used in the same table). We will then write the code to load either. If an image stored at a URL is defined, we will cache that image, so after the initial load, our UITableView loads only the cached version. Creating an image cache sounds fancy but it is simply a mutable dictionary (which is useful for many projects!)

Watch an Introduction to the Course Below….

Two affordable purchasing options, both with social-sharing discounts.

Purchase Option 1 - Lifetime Access

Get Lifetime Access to this course for a one-time purchase price. You can download (or stream) the movie files and download any source projects.